Sorry, he needs to go. The citizenry of Charlottesville should have no confidence in his leadership. (And we have the footage).
Promote the cop with the bullhorn. He was the only one actually doing something productive.
The police FAILED to keep the protesters separated: police work 101
And no cars should have been near the area of protest.
Cops thought the alt-right protesters were armed, which is legal in VA. When they really believe someone is armed cops tend to stay away. They only shoot the un-armed ones.
I just want to make a shout out to the Virginia legislature that made it legal for people to openly carry military-style weapons to carry out in the open.
The explanation that police needed to take time out to get into appropriate riot gear says everything about just how incompetently this whole weekend was handled.
Regrets? That is some weak teaâŚ
His thoughts and prayers are with the victims but itâs too soon to talk about appropriate restrictions on rallies organized by white supremacists and neo-nazis.
Having police display themselves in riot gear is provocative too though (e.g. Ferguson). But Iâm not sure the right lesson was learned. The real problem, as @blandsten pointed out, is that it was legal for paramilitaries to march in armed to the teeth.
In Ferguson the police were armed to the teeth and anonymous, confronting a crowd who were not. In Charlottesville, the heavily armed and anonymous guys were the crowd, confronting a police who were not.
I worked with and advised a police department that faced a number of very similar events recently. They are in an impossible situation, damned if they do and damned if they donât, too passive or too aggressive. They can prepare and plan all they want, but events donât always follow the plan. Good PDs like the one I worked with learn from experience. Hopefully Charlottesvilleâs will as well. Give them a chance before passing judgment.
Considering that the nazis had discussions with the police before the event, how did they not know nazis would be armed? If they were not warned just by the sight of sticks, knives, brass knuckles and shields should have been a clue. Not buying it chief. Pack your bags nazi.
At Boston rallies- streets were closed off. Why not Charlottesville
Iâd think any time you have a bunch of neo-Nazis and white supremacists ârallying,â it would probably be good to have a substantial number of officers in riot gear, ready to go. Because unless you can keep the neo-Nazis and white supremacist separated from everyone else, theyâre going to attack other people, and other people are going to attack them. Who throws the first punch in each particular interaction isnât really the point. The point is that some kind of violent clash is highly predictable, and serious violence is quite likely,
Maybe the reserves of riot-gear wearing police could be kept out of sight in vehicles, until needed, with cops in regular gear on site until that point. But thereâs a good chance they will be needed, and fast, so best be ready.
And with a mob of torch-wielding neo-Nazis and white supremacists storming a college campus chanting âJews will not replace usâ and âblood and soil,â the night before the main ârally,â it seems like that should have been a strong hint that they needed to pull out all the stops if they were to have any chance of preventing violence at the main ârallyâ the next day, or at least minimizing the violence. Just sayin.
Charlottesville is more a large town than a city, and a college town to boot, so I really doubt they had the proper resources.
They probably should have alerted the national guard, but I donât want to fault their mayor knowing as little as I know of how the decision making went down.
Or maybe I should fault him.
@pebent No comparison between the police force in a city like Boston and a city like Charlottesville. Poughkeepsie is probably more prepared for violence than Charlottesville.
He said police âhad a very large footprint during this entire endeavor.â
Dude, you know and I know if this had been black folks out there protesting, it would have been shoot first, ask questions later.
This is not an attitudinal issue. Citizens elect the Mayor, the Mayor appoints the head of the police department, the department makes the rules and enforces them. If they donât comply the way they shouldâŚthe Citizen Control Board has the Citizen Review Board take over. Citizens pay the taxes, citizens own the department. This is not rocket science.
Any police officer that does not like how this works, is free to go find another job that suits his/her sensibilities.
Did u READ the article? The police tried and were shot down by a federal judge. You âsupportâ the police when the shoot and hit but otherwise they arenât doing their job? Wtf?
In my occasional conversations w/ police, they have mentioned that open carry is what makes them feel the least safe and I can see that this. They have told me that they HAVE spoken up about gun control but that the politicians/leadership do not want to hear it. It sounds as though the police were not listened to by leadership in the lead up to this rally and it also seems as though the white supremacists did not follow the agreed upon parameters.
While I have issues w/ the way that law enforcement and the justice system have mistreated black and brown people, and I would tend to believe that some of the police sympathized w/ the w-s protesters, I respect that the jobs of police are at times dangerous, and a rally like this, full of heavily armed, mentally ill (many of them IMO), angry, insecure men who feel they have something to proveâŚthis was NOT a safe situation. I kept thinking, though, as I watched some of the âinactive copâ videos, how differently they might act if the same armed protesters were armed black/brown men pushing back on them.
It would be interesting (if you could get them to talk on record, which you likely canât) to know what individual Câville police felt/thought during the rallyâŚand how safe/unsafe they felt.
If you have not had a chance yet to view VICEâs report Race and Terror, I highly recommend it. Itâs chilling and creepyâŚthe reporter did a great job and it shows the mental state (and level of weaponry) of some of the white supremacists at this rally. I have a much fuller appreciation of what it must have been like for the citizens of Charlottesville, including the police, to have these armed goons descend upon your cityâŚ
In addition to the young woman killed, two veteran police officers lost their lives b/c of this (stupid) rally.
Open carry needs to be revisited.
Yes, I agree the local police would never have had the resources to deal with that on their own. But thatâs what state troopers are for, and mutual aid from other local police departments, and the national guard if necessary, at least deployed if not utilized. How much of all that the city asked for, and how much they got, I donât know.
But Iâm pretty sure if a mob of torch wielding, hate-spewing brown-skinned people had rampaged across a college campus the night before, and it was known that the same group would be holding a ârallyâ the next day, there would have been boots-on-the-ground aplenty the next day.
I donât know who to fault, or how much, probably a combination of people and a mixture of avoidable and unavoidable error. But they should have had more cops there, and those that were there should have been better prepared. Yes, I realize this is 20/20 hindsight stuff. Hopefully that hindsight leads to better preparation in the future.
I agree totally that the national guard should have been called, and donât understand why they werenât, but the state troopers apparently were called. The two men who were killed in the helicopter crash were state troopers.
Signer claims he did everything he could, but of course he would, and perhaps he did. Perhaps he thought the state troopers would be enough.
Hopefully what police chiefs learn from this is that theyâd better have enough cops to completely surround the neo-Nazis / white supremacists, with a double line that keeps an open space between them and counterprotesters, and for that matter between them and the general public. If it takes 2,000 cops and national guard, so be it. I hate the idea that we would need that kind of police presence to keep the peace, but if thatâs what it takes, what choice do we have.